WASHINGTON TALK: SNAPSHOT

WASHINGTON TALK: SNAPSHOT; Where Have All the Capital's Visitors Gone?

Special to The New York Times

Published: June 28, 1989

WASHINGTON, June 27—
Is it the wet weather? The highly publicized drug wars? A lack of ''knockout'' exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution?

These are some of the easy theories. The hard fact is that statistics show a sharp decline in the number of visitors to some of Washington's main tourist attractions.

The number of visitors to the Lincoln Memorial, according to the National Park Service, was down a whopping 59 percent for the first four months of the year, while the Jefferson Memorial showed a decline of 39 percent and attendance at the various Smithsonian museums on the Mall was down, through May, by 14 percent compared with a similar period last year.

What appears to be hard fact is something of a mystery. What, for example, would account for 561,000 fewer people visiting the Lincoln Memorial even as hotel occupancy rates, according to the Washington Convention and Visitors Association, showed gains of 3 percent to 5 percent this year?

The Park Service says it is not sure, but it suspects that it may soon be able to explain things. Last July, seeking to get a better tally of the people who seriously visit the memorials - as opposed to those who may only, for example, play tag on the steps - the Park Service changed its place and method of method of counting.

At the Lincoln Memorial, this means that six times a day a 15-minute count is made of people entering the memorial. Before last July, said Sandra A. Alley, chief regional spokesman for the Park Service, ''we counted everybody in sight.''

Perhaps a more accurate gauge of the 1989 tourist season is the 8 percent decline in visitors to the Washington Monument, where, because of its elevators, the year-to-year comparisons are considered more reliable.